Notice for WordPress Users

Steven Carr — 2018-02-05

WordPress has become the go-to choice for most websites launched today. At last count, almost 30% of all websites were using WordPress and 60% of those on a CMS were on WordPress (Source). With so much riding on the WordPress platform, security has become a major concern. The WordPress project has done a good job of maintaining an update cycle to help us all stay more secure, but everything humans do has flaws. We are imperfect creatures for sure.

Recent update issues

The most recent automatic update released to all WordPress sites contained a bug ( Source). The bug causes the automatic update process to fail so future minor releases will not be applied and only through a manual update action can the next update be applied. To you that means the next time there would be an automatic update that could fix another problem would not be applied until you force it to update.
While this is not a big issue today, it is the type of thing that leads to big issues later. We have seen more websites hacked from out of date CMS platforms than anything else. If your website gets out of date and a hacker finds a hole you could be in a mess. The old saying holds true in this case, “An ounce of prevention beats a pound of cure.” Running a manual update now could save you piles of problems to fix later.

What you need to do

Update. Plain and simple, go into your WordPress dashboard and run the manual update process. It should download a new update and fix this little bug right away. We always recommend updating any plugins as well. When you are all done, go through the site and make sure everything is compatible with the new update. For maintenance and 360 customers we will run this update for you and check through your website. Also, if you had our crew run this last WordPress update as an incidental service we will be running this new update at no additional cost for you.

If you are unsure on how to run an update, give us a call. We can walk you through it or go do it for you.

Extra precautions we take

Every WordPress site we build gets a few extra plugins to help with different issues. We preload a tool that monitors all core and plugin packages for available updates. When those are available we notify our customers so they can take action. These systems should still function with the current bug. We will continue to monitor and notify our customers on needed updates. Keeping your site running well is an important part of our service.

What happens next

We will continue to monitor and report on issues that concern our clients. If you have a question about this or anything else related to your WordPress website, just get in touch.